Innovative Projects Realized

Automatisation des achats dans les PME

Dans la plupart des organisations, surtout les PME, l’automatisation des achats passe par l’acquisition d’une solution informatique qui supporte les processus d’approvisionnement. Malgré la complexité des achats de services informatiques et l’importance des dépenses associées, on ne connaît pas suffisamment les spécificités de l’achat des solutions TI ni la façon de minimiser les nombreux risques associés à cette acquisition, surtout chez les PME. Le but de cette recherche est de mieux comprendre les besoins, les défis et les options disponibles pour l’automatisation des achats d’une organisation de taille moyenne (70 employés) du secteur de la distribution de quincaillerie industrielle. L’étude approfondie de ce cas permettra de proposer des recommandations pertinentes pour des PME canadiennes intéressées par l’automatisation des achats. La méthodologie choisie est l’étude de cas, à l’aide des entrevues avec les personnes impliquées à l’interne et avec les fournisseurs des solutions.

Personal Visual Analytics for Personal Finance and TimeManagement

Even if people have access to a past history of how they spend their time and

their money, it can be challenging to make sense of past patterns in order to

make decisions about how to better use their time and money in the future. By

enabling past patterns to “pop out” visually, interactive visual representations

have the potential to make analysis of personal data easier. However, many

visualization tools are complex and aimed at experts. Our goal is to understand

how to design visual representations that anyone can understand.

The two interns will explore the design space of visual interfaces for managing

and understanding patterns in personal data (personal finance data and time

management data). They will explore various visual ways to represent the data to

make it easier for everyday people to understand their current use of time /

financial spending behaviour. Exploring the design space will be accomplished

by developing and informally evaluating a series of prototype visual interfaces.

Analysis of the Community Scholars Program for United Way of the Lower Mainland and Simon Fraser University Library

The project will evaluate the Community Scholars Program (CSP) to promote program sustainability, growth and further development. The CSP provides free research database access for 500 community organizations in British Columbia and is a partnership between United Way of the Lower Mainland, Mindset Social Innovation Foundation, and the SFU Library. Now in its second phase, the program was created in 2016 to address the problem of access to research outside of the academic community. While academics in Canada and around the world are studying social problems and possible solutions, their findings are published in peer-reviewed journals that typically require expensive subscriptions that the vast majority of the more than 170,000 non-profit and charitable organizations in Canada cannot afford. (https://www.lib.sfu.ca/about/overview/services-you/community-scholars).

Development of rheological methods to investigate the viscoelastic behavior and stability of paints – Year two

Paints are complex colloidal suspensions that usually contain binders (resins), solvents, pigments and rheological modifiers. From production to applications, these raw materials should remain uniformly mixed and stable during pumping processes and storage, as well as after application with brushes, rollers, spray guns, etc. It is very important to know how the paint behaves under different deformation. Rheology is the study of the deformation and flow of matter. Thus, it can provide some quantitative information, such as yield stress, viscoelastic properties, shear thickening and shear-thinning behavior, which could be useful for the production plant and for establishing correlations between final properties and formulation parameters. Hence, rheological methods will help better control the paint quality. Therefore, the aim of this work is to develop rheological methods that will generate data that could be correlated with empirical test data used in the paint industry and used to guide the production and control the quality of paints. Different from previous work, solvent evaporation will be taken into consideration in order to better simulate the actual condition in this work. The performance of paint on surfaces with different texture and roughness will also be evaluated to better predict the paint behavior after application.

Development of rheological methods to investigate the viscoelastic behavior and stability of paints

Paints are complex colloidal suspensions that usually contain binders (resins), solvents, pigments and rheological modifiers. From production to applications, these raw materials should remain uniformly mixed and stable during pumping processes and storage, as well as after application with brushes, rollers, spray guns, etc. It is very important to know how the paint behaves under different deformation. Rheology is the study of the deformation and flow of matter. Thus, it can provide some quantitative information, such as yield stress, viscoelastic properties, shear thickening and shear-thinning behavior, which could be useful for the production plant and for establishing correlations between final properties and formulation parameters. Hence, rheological methods will help better control the paint quality. Therefore, the aim of this work is to develop rheological methods that will generate data that could be correlated with empirical test data used in the paint industry and used to guide the production and control the quality of paints. Different from previous work, solvent evaporation will be taken into consideration in order to better simulate the actual condition in this work. The performance of paint on surfaces with different texture and roughness will also be evaluated to better predict the paint behavior after application.

Counteracting habitat loss: Comparing the efficacy of major management practices in restoring and maintaining grassland habitats for at risk reptiles

Prescribed fire and mechanical removal of woody vegetation have become popular disturbance methods for restoring globally rare alvar and grassland habitats that support many species at risk, such as reptiles. However, the effects that these restoration efforts have on rare reptiles is largely unknown. This study will identify alterations in habitat usage of endangered snake species by monitoring their presence within habitats, surveying vegetative structure, and monitoring environmental temperatures both before and after management across multiple locations with grassland-alvar habitat. This research will provide insight into which disturbance method results in the highest quality of habitat, specifically in terms of thermal ecology, for rare reptiles in these habitas. Ontario Nature is a not-for-profit conservation organization that is partnering on this project. From the study, they will gain knowledge on the best management practices for grassland and alvar habitats on their 25 properties across Ontario.

A National Study of Trans Men and Non-Binary People’s Sexual Health and Wellness

Sex Now is a community-based health survey for gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men (GBMSM) in Canada. It is one of only a few studies of GBMSM to be inclusive of transgender men and non-binary people which presents a novel and exciting opportunity to understand these groups’ sexual health and wellness outcomes and needs in order to create public health interventions that are targeted and appropriate to them. Working with the Community-Based Research Centre, the intern will analyse data specific to these groups and determine ways in which the data can be shared with communities in meaningful ways. The intern will develop a public community report as well as an academic manuscript for peer-reviewed publication.

A methodological approach to the use of data-supported environmental factors in support of the introduction of autonomous air vehicles in a shared airspace

The evolution of aerospace technologies and automated systems has been accompanied by the phenomenon of “de-crewing”. A large body of current research focuses on how to move to single-pilot operations (SPO), but a major barrier to the implementation of SPO and other autonomous commercial aircraft operations is that advances in human-machine interactions and human factors have not kept pace with technological change. The objective of the research project that is the subject of this proposal is to develop a methodology to simulate autonomous flight in a real-time, virtual environment. The project focuses on the introduction of a fully autonomous aircraft into a shared airspace in a simulated environment that enables the acquisition of data to support the development of a shared manned and un-manned airspace. The project proposes the implementation of a case study in which autonomous flight in shared airspace is simulated using the virtual representation of an unmanned air vehicle flying in a virtual airspace that is populated with real-time data. The research is based on, and extends, recent research in the area of situation awareness, ontological knowledge representation, next-generation Air Traffic Management and user-centered design.

Automatic Classification of Security Events

IBM QRadar needs to be able to categorize events generated by hundreds of different network devices in order to function as a Security Information and Event Management (SIEM). This categorization is currently a manual process and our aim is to automate this task. We have a database of over 579,000 events coming from over 300 devices that have been manually classified over the years. We also have the classification categories: 18 high level categories, broken down into 500+ subcategories; these categories broadly correspond to security threats.
The goal of this research is to use this database to develop a model that can then be used to assist in the classification of future events as new devices, or new versions of existing devices, are introduced.
Each “event” is parsed by QRadar’s “Device Support Module” (DSM), which outputs a unique identifier along with other useful information e.g. Source / Destination IP/Port, event generated time, user responsible for generating the event, and so on.

Geomagnetic indoor positioning based on smart phone sensor

This project aims at solving the difficult problems faced by indoor positioning and related issues, which are part of the future development direction. For different positioning environments and positioning requests, the project will explore the corresponding positioning schemes, conversion mechanism sand switching strategies. The project will use the geomagnetic-based technology that does not require additional facilities, choose the best indoor positioning algorithm to meet the requirements of indoor positioning accuracy under different scene areas; and publish relevant papers about the study results.

Dynamic Determining of Time-window Parameters in Spatiotemporal Association Rules Mining

This project will address the problem of time-window parameter adaptation in the process of sequence association rules mining. During the proposed internship in Canada, the main task will be to develop the method and algorithm for implementing time-window adaptive parameters. The advantage of the algorithm is that the identification of events does not rely on the fixed-size time windows. It can reflect the dynamic evolution characteristics of different geographical phenomena. This research can be applied to other fields and allows for publication of papers on research results.

Adaptive operating room (OR) scheduling and control

McCaig Tower, as one of the largest sites of Foothills Medical Centre, provides the world’s

safest and most accurate surgeries to patients, and a SmarTrack system, an interactive

patient tracking system, helps the operating room (OR) management. However, due to the

dependence of ORs on pre-operative preparations and post-operative capacities, the

disturbances that come from patients and ORs themselves, and the lack of integration of

healthcare systems with IE and MSc, the OR management in McCaig Tower is faced with

difficulties in handling exceptions. Consequently, only manual adaptive control can be carried

out by experienced nurses or directives for peri-operative (peri-op) activities. Such manual

adaptive peri-op control is based on priority rules (some informal) and is not efficient in most

cases, because of the limitation of information sharing for decision making. This project is to

develop and implement OR scheduling and adaptive peri-op control to improve the response

time and efficiency in the management/scheduling of ORs in McCaig Tower.